Facebook is still racking up false accounts even as it continues to try and flush out imposters on the dominant social network, which is seeing its value close to being halved on Wall Street.
The Mark Zuckerberg-run company disclosed during its first public quarterly earnings report last week that it now has 955 million …

COMMENTS

Page:

Duplicates

I think I've got two Facebook accounts - I set one up in my real name when I needed to get in touch with someone who didn't really know how to use anything else but before that I started one in a made-up name to see what the site was like.

Re: Duplicates

Duplicates are a massive problem and definitely account for a higher percentage than they are letting on. Accounts for pets is just the tip of the iceberg, but they won't want to let on as it will tank the share price even more.

Accounts in celebrities names

Accounts in pets names

Accounts for cheating on partners

Accounts for games so you can give your main account bonuses faster

Accounts for businesses who don't like the standard pages facebook let you create

Accounts for idiots who have locked themselves out of their original account

I only use the site to keep in touch with family and friends who are far afield, but more and more obviously fake or duplicate accounts keep cropping up on people you may know. More than actual human accounts. It's a massive problem it's got to be in the 30 to 40% mark.

Also I wonder how they classify 'closed accounts' because when you close it you can log in four months later and everything is there as if you never left it, so are they classing those accounts in their total user base?

It's much worse than Facebook claims

I used to have two Facebook accounts, one real and one fake. The Facebook nazi's decided my real one was fake, deactivated it, and demanded I authenticate it with documentation if I wanted it reactivated. My response was "screw you", and so if and when I ever "need" to log into Facebook, I use the fake account.

A while back, in my workplace, we had a discussion of this and what was surprising was how many people, like me, had their real Facebook accounts flagged as fakes, and like me, chose to not provide Facebook with proof they were who they claimed they were, and instead just keep using their fake account.

So despite Facebooks admission that almost 10% of Facebook accounts are fakes, the real percentage has got to be higher. Much higher.

@Code Monkey

Cats have accounts

I spoke with a colleague at lunch time who explained to me that she created an account specially for her cat......

She and her friends have cat pages on which the "cats" exchange information and images "of other cats". Believe it or not my colleague is university educated, hardworking and methodical. She is definately not the kind of person that I would have imagined creating such a page.

My colleagues and her friends also have their own personal pages.

I wonder how many other Cat / Dogs / Animal pages exist I presume there are equal amounts of pages for Perverts, Fetichistes, Trees, Badgers, Telephones and endless amounts of useless crap.

Re: Cats have accounts

Re: Cats have accounts

Slightly off topic, but a decade or so back, when banks and credit card companies were prolific generators of "your application will be instantly approved" mailings, a friend of mine obtained a credit card in the name of her cat. The card was is the name of "Eric De Catt" or something like that (the cats name being Eric), and she used it for all the food and vets bills and related stuff. Totally makes a mockery of security checks, credit references, money laundering regs and all that sh*t. No doubt FB will now start asking for proof of identity for cat and pet accounts.....

And who really cares about FB and how many dud accounts they have? The companies whole ethos seems very dubious, and I feel sorry for the kids of today who post their entire life on there. It will all come back to haunt them sometime.

Re: Cats have accounts

My dog never logs in to his Facebook account. He says only chihuahuas go near FB. He's addicted to a dog website called "catsuptrees.com" which he says is educational. I refuse to let him have a headcam so he can upload his own videos, though.

Re: Cats have accounts

Several of my friends choose to post a large number of photos of their cats on Facebook. Some people enjoyed these endearing pictures, whereas others expressed their ire at the feline spam clogging their what-people-are-having-for-dinner feeds. Their rather neat solution was to set up separate accounts for their cats and have those accounts befriend only those people who wanted to see inordinate numbers of cat photos.

In fact I rather wish that some of my other friends would adopt the same approach for the large number of photos of their children.

(Yeah, I know that the correct solution, technically, would have been to establish a group, but I guess most users don't know how to do that whereas they do know how to set up an account...)

Re: Cats have accounts

Re: Cats have accounts

Nothing against your post, but those it really matter how many cats, dogs and parrots have accounts and how many are false, duplicate and so on. who cares how many similar "persons" have an hotmail or gmail account.

The problem seems to be that Facebook for such a long time tried to speak about how many persons used Facebook. I have a feeling that sooner or later intelligent people give up, I never started, Does not prove me intelligent, however.

Re: Most fake accounts are made by Facebook itself for Companies paying for those...

To be fair, it's optional to use Facebook; it's not a necessary public service or a mandatory registration system. So if FB want to have stupid rules, then they can, and the remedy to those who don't like it is simply not to use it... which I wish a lot more people would do, thus hastening FB's demise.

Although admittedly I would then have to find another way of ascertaining what time my friends awake and what form of meteorological activity they are experiencing.

Re: Most fake accounts are made by Facebook itself for Companies paying for those...

it's optional to use Facebook;

It's still optional to use Facebook; at least one member of the Cabinet here has suggested integrating DigiD logins (just about anything related to logging in to some government web service) with Farcebook. I'm not sure if her major intestine then lept up and throttled her brain a bit, causing her to quickly add that it would be an alternate authentication method, but it's clearly not beyond the lack of thinking of some minister to come up with this crap.

And once it's in place, it'd be easy enough to make it compulsory, so that they can drop the normal login service "because so few people use that anymore".

Re: I don't care

Second Life

I know a lot of Second Life residents had a Facebook account for their avatar as an extension to their Second Life presence. Linden Lab even semi-encouraged it inasmuch as you can link your Second Life profile to a Facebook account.

Apparently Facebook had a massive cull on this last year and removed thousands of such accounts.

I also have friends who have an 'online persona' type Facebook account that they are less picky about who friends along with a 'proper' account that only actual friends are invited to.

So, as others have said, alt accounts are more prevalent than Facebook think.

Re: People still own cats?

Re: People still own cats?

Re: People still own cats?

"What? Analogue ones?"

Of course they bloody do! You young people, with your digital This, and your iThat don't know you're born. Digital cats don't sound right. Their purrs are attenuated by all the sampling artefacts. The purr of an analogue cat sounds much warmer.